The UX Book: Agile UX Design for a Quality User Experience

by Rex Hartson, Pardha S. Pyla

The discipline of user experience (UX) design has matured into a confident practice and this edition reflects, and in some areas accelerates, that evolution. Technically this is the second edition of The UX Book , but so much of it is new, it is more like a sequel. One of the major positive trends in UX is the continued emphasis on design―a kind of design that highlights the designer’s creative skills and insights and embodies a synthesis of technology with usability, usefulness, aesthetics, and meaningfulness to the user. In this edition a new conceptual top-down design framework is introduced to help readers with this evolution. This entire edition is oriented toward an agile UX lifecycle process, explained in the funnel model of agile UX, as a better match to the now de facto standard agile approach to software engineering. To reflect these trends, even the subtitle of the book is changed to “Agile UX design for a quality user experience”. Designed as a how-to-do-it handbook and field guide for UX professionals and a textbook for aspiring students, the book is accompanied by in-class exercises and team projects. The approach is practical rather than formal or theoretical. The primary goal is still to imbue an understanding of what a good user experience is and how to achieve it. To better serve this, processes, methods, and techniques are introduced early to establish process-related concepts as context for discussion in later chapters. 

Genres: Design, Technology, School

916 pages, Paperback

Published December 14, 2018

Reviews

[Ruth · Rating 5 out of 5]

So some reviewers write that this book offers no wisdom???

If anyone can say that they didn’t really read the book or read it with their eyes closed!

This is an incredible well of knowledge. Everything you won’t find in the superficial articles about UX you will find in this book. The foundations, the tools, the methods, the process and the philosophy.

I would maybe recommend reading it after you had some experience with UX work and working with development teams. But you will take a lot as a novice as well and anything that won't fall into place on first read will make sense once you get some mileage.

I had the first edition and it was the book that actually made UX click into place in my head and it started making sense. When the second (this edition) came out I got it, and now I’m reading it, and the magic is happening again. New insights and deeper understanding of my profession is the reward for diving into this thorough, fascinating tome.

If you want superficial articles about latest fads go and type UX into your search box, if you want an in-depth, university level knowledge get this book.
Don’t expect it to read it like a holiday paperback, expect to read a serious material and you will be rewarded and you will be one head above most UXrs on the market today.

[Nathanael Bennett · Rating 1 out of 5]

Unwieldy and unusable. This book offers almost no worthwhile wisdom, and does so in an extremely high number of pages. While I can appreciate the need for process in a young field such as UX, the painstaking detail of this book dilutes any recoverable knowledge to the point where the reader is left with only vague notions such as the UX wheel and scraps of industry vernacular.

It felt as though the author, in absence of any real-world wisdom, simply granularized every possible process to create a logically bulletproof, perfectly useless text. It is a fantasy that the UX process described by this text would ever be implemented in its entirety.

[Bec Daniels]

Thesis book

[Reed · Rating 3 out of 5]

For class